Motoring
THE BENTLEY BOYS – AND GIRLS
In 1903 Mary Anderson, a real-estate developer from Alabama, patented a window-cleaning device.
There were few cars then and no one wanted her invention but, after 1920, when the patent had expired, her design was widely adopted by the motor industry. By the time she died in 1953, it was ubiquitous. We call her invention windscreen wipers. She never made a cent from it.
In 1910, a 15-year-old girl became the first woman in Britain to be fined for speeding. She stood five feet two and rode a Matchless motorbike. In 1926, as the Hon Mrs Victor Bruce, she won the inaugural Monte Carlo rally, Coupe des Dames, in an AC, driving the whole way from John o’groats. She next persuaded W O Bentley to lend her a 4.5-litre monster to attempt the world 24-hour solo record.
Never having driven a Bentley, she needed three cushions to reach the pedals and see over the bonnet. In Bond Street, she bought herself ‘a pale blue leather jacket… It had no special padding but I thought it looked very smart.’ She averaged 89.57mph over 2,000 miles and remains the only Bentley driver of either gender to achieve a solo 24-hour record.
Around the same time, multimillionaire Dorothy Paget – famed for her racehorses, gambling, girth and 100-a-day consumption of Balkan Sobranie cigarettes – was taken in a Bentley for a 130mph spin round the banked circuit at Brooklands.
Trussed up in a tweed coat she called ‘speckled hen’, she was so enthralled that she bank-rolled the development of supercharged racing Bentleys. The fame of those beasts is partly why there is still a firm called Bentley today.
These determined ladies all feature in a fascinating new book, Racing in the Dark, by Peter Grimsdale. This despite the fact that the book is actually about the Bentley Boys – wealthy sponsors and enthusiasts of the fledgling Bentley Motors such as Sir Henry Birkin, Woolf Barnato, Dr Dudley Benjafield, John Duff, Frank Clement, Noel van Raalte and Sammy Davis.
They weren’t just the rich playboys of legend – though some were indeed rich and played hard – but seriously capable racing drivers in an age when handling those cars at speed took muscle as well as nerve. You were lucky if you walked away from a crash.
‘My first impression,’ wrote Benjafield, ‘was that the whole of my chest had been stoved in … my mouth felt different … the four upper front teeth had been broken off flush with the gum and, with the exception of a few bits embedded in my lower lip, which was pulp, they were stuck in the steering wheel.’
But it wasn’t just the drivers who led Bentley to dominate Le Mans during the hectic decade of the marque’s independent existence. It was the engineering genius of W O himself, the public schoolboy apprenticed to the Doncaster railway works, who transformed the Sopwith Camel into one of the best fighter planes of the First World War.
He was a natural leader, a taciturn, focused perfectionist respected as much by the London East Enders who built the first Bentley in a hayloft as by his millionaire backers. However, he had little time for shareholders or running a business, which is why in 1931 the buccaneering Bentley Motors was absorbed by its stately rival, Rolls Royce.
Grimsdale’s book is as much about the people as about the cars. He evokes them vividly, demonstrating that, whether behind the wheel, in the boardroom or sweeping the workshop floor, character – as is said but not often enough – is destiny.